This Mario Kart Mod Is the Answer to All at-Home Fitness Regimes

Let’s be honest here, exercising for the sake of exercising is just plain dull. Going to the gym blatantly sucks too, but what if you could gamify it, 16-bit-style? Meet the SNES Mario Kart exercise bike and truly revel in a seriously hard workout.

A Canadian modder named Brent Smith, turned a crummy exercise bike into a SNES controller using a bunch of sensors, switches, transistors and an Arduino, plugging it straight into the console – there are no emulators at play here. Peddling at a certain rate keeps the accelerator held down, while buttons take care of steering and firing off specials.

Mario Kart on the SNES was notoriously hard, much harder than say the N64 version – now try controlling that by peddling and steering with super sensitive buttons on a set of handlebars. Yeah, you’re going to be working out both your legs and your gaming skills, hard. [YouTube via Kotaku]